“Seen as an economic, political, cultural, and psychological re-membering vision, it should continue to guide remembering practices”

There is no way we can survive as a nation in the world without finding unity.

They want to be the ones telling people: “This is what we have done in history” but when people begin to say, “No this is what we have done in history” it’s a different thing.

It was a revelation for me, in a practical sense, that you could write in an African language and still reach an audience beyond that language through the art of translation.

People went to war as a result of it and even today, every Sunday.

What’s good about writing is that when you write novels or fiction, people can see that the problems in one region are similar to problems in another region.

In terms of language, English is very dominant vis-Ã-vis African language. That in itself is a power relationship – between languages and communities – because the English language is a determinant of the ladder to achievement.

I’m writing for those people in Kenya, but in Irvine and in New York.

How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one that knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa?

We think of politics in terms of power and who has the power. Politics is the end to which that power is put.

And even in terms of justice, law codes, the legal system. A person who does not know English in Africa is excluded from that system because he can only operate through acts of translation.

Christianity and Western civilization-what countless crimes have been committed in thy name!

I’m more trying to connect; I’m more listening to people. Whatever I get is very meaningful to me.

We can appreciate each other’s languages. And the question of being uncomfortable about our languages would go away.

Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa’s souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind?

Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it.

The Bible in translation is being read to thousands and thousands in Africa. It is an integral part of their functioning and the way they look at the world.

It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way.

You don’t even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture and civilization.

When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.

Everybody knows that fraternities are a normal culture in all colleges. It exists in all colleges. President Clinton was a member of a fraternity. In fact, anybody who goes to College in the United States is a member of a College fraternity. There is absolutely nothing evil or occultic about fraternity.

Another way of judging the value of a prophet’s religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.

Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.

I’ve always been multi-cultural myself. I’m not black and I’m not white and I’m not pink and I’m not green. Eartha Kitt has no color, and that is how barriers are broken.